


just a storyteller.

by aiineslin



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 09:23:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2768006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aiineslin/pseuds/aiineslin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Varric was just the storyteller. Nothing more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just a storyteller.

Varric is the storyteller. He isn’t the storymaker by a long shot, no, not at all.

 

* * *

 

 

He merely follows, documents and if on occasions, he intervenes with sweet cakes from far Orlais and too-strong whiskey from the Hangman to stop the foolish mage from collapsing in on herself under the weight of her legend and misaimed aspirations, those are moments he keeps to himself when he pens the tales of the hero and her six companions.

 

He despairs of Anders. He may have great hopes for the cocky, feathered mage once – a love interest, he decides, allowing his professional gaze to flick dispassionately over the other’s form. He marks the moment Hawke’s eyes widen slightly when he confronts them, chest heaving and magic vibrating off him in a fierce wail. She cannot stop speaking of him on the way back home. Varric does not stop her. He is already drafting lines in his mind – a particularly promising one beginning with the line, “ _There was a spark when they first met, literally and figuratively speaking …”_

And then Anders had to go blow up the Chantry, and Varric sees his mage break apart into brittle little pieces. She doesn’t stick a knife between his ribs. No, she loved him too much for that – an all-consuming, blind love that had only flared harder and burnt brighter in the days following the deaths of her sister, brother and mother – and Varric watches her tell him to leave the Gallows, _leave_. He marks the hard set in her jaw, and before they move off, he steps behind her and nudges her hand with an elbow. She doesn’t look down.

 

She possesses a marked fondness of Merril, despite her own misgivings about blood magic. As the years wore on, Varric sees her dance the tightrope between the yawning chasm of Anders’ and Merril’s relationship, he watches her distance herself from Merril, and he notes the all too knowing way that Merril accepts the distance with the smallest inclination of her head, the restraint in which she asks Hawke questions.

 

He brings Daisy food after the whole Eluvian debacle, in the bad weeks where she is shut up tight in her little hovel with no company but herself and the blasted sheet of glass. He watches her eat the porridge slowly, steadily, and he rests a hand on her shoulder when tears collect at the corners of her eyes and dribble down the slope of her cheeks to salt the porridge.

 

Fenris and Hawke have many opposing viewpoints, especially on topics to do with magic and mages. They are, however, united on the subject of slavers and how best to deal with them. The only time he sees Hawke and Anders argue was when the subject of returning Fenris to Danarius came up. It was one of the nights when Varric brings the Hanged Man’s best rotgut to her, and he sits by her side and watches her make her way slowly and determinedly through three huge pints of swill that would have dropped any grown man two and a half pints ago.

 

“What have I gotten myself into, Varric?” she asks, later.

 

“I don’t know,” Varric replies honestly. He lets her sleep in his room when her eyelids finally droop down, carries her upstairs and covers her with a heavy woollen blanket. When she leaves in the morning, Hawke thanks him and they do not make mention about the subject in the future.

 

She tries to be friends with everybody, and Varric feels the smallest amount of pity for her. He doesn’t feel pity when he remembers Daisy weeping into her porridge. (Sometimes, a dwarf had to make a stand.)

 

“Varric,” she says in the end, when she is standing on the docks with the sun behind her. He cannot see her eyes. He merely makes out the wry slant of her lips, and the way the wind tousles her short hair. “This is it, then?”

 

“This is it,” he agrees, and he draws Hawke’s small, calloused hands into his own. “But no worries, Hawke. I’ll tell your story. Won’t be a tavern in all of Thedas that don’t know your name by the time the year is out.”

 

She stoops down, and her face is close, and her eyes are clear and dry.

 

“Thank you, Varric. Make me into a drinking song, would you?”

 

He nods.

 

“I won’t say goodbye.”

 

Varric watches the ship leave. Her figure is straight and unyielding. Not once did he see her head turn.

 

He leaves the docks with a hard tightness in his chest.

 

The next day, Varric tidies his room in the Hanged Man and makes preparations to leave.

 

* * *

 

 

He’d never been a storymaker. Just a storyteller. 


End file.
